Toshiba unveils world's first HD DVD writer

Always expect firsts from Toshiba America, the maker of computers/storage/projectors and so much more. The company announced the world's first HD DVD burner for desktop computers. (Wondering what HD DVDs are? Catch up on a story I wrote last year)

We knew this was coming. High-def DVD players has been available for since April 2006 (mostly thanks to Toshiba's computer and consumer electronics divisions). Toshiba says more than 1.5 million HD DVD movies have been sold. But who can resist using the same discs for storage purposes? Since high-definition video needs oodles of gigabytes, the discs can hold 30 GBs of digital files (that's approximately up to five full-length standard DVD films, up to 7,500 MP3 songs or up to 30,000 high-quality images, according to Toshiba).

The SD-H903A internal drive will be sold to computer companies and manufacturers beginning in February. The good news for consumers, we may start seeing PCs with HD DVD burners in the spring or summer.

Other specs:
It only writes HD DVD content in real time (that's 1x speed)
Also compatible with all older DVD and CD formats.

(c) blogs.ocregister.com

Three Intel quad-cores coming Monday

Intel plans to launch three quad-core processors on Monday, covering two Xeons for lower-end servers and one mainstream model for desktop computers, sources familiar with the plan said.

As expected, the desktop chip is called the Core 2 Quad 6600 and will join the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 model Intel already ships. The new processor will run at 2.4GHz, and the front-side bus that links the chip to the rest of the system will run at 1066MHz, the company is expected to announce at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week.

Also set to arrive are two low-end Xeons, the 2.13GHz 3210 and 2.4GHz 3220. Both are designed for single-processor servers. The chips have 8MB cache and a 1066MHz front-side bus.

Intel declined to comment for this story.

The chipmaker began its quad-core product launch in November but now is fleshing out the lineup. It often launches desktop products with extreme models geared for demanding video game systems, then adds more moderately priced mainstream models later.

"I expect, with respect to the desktop quad-core, it's mostly a matter of maintaining a certain cadence, even if, practically speaking, there won't be a whole lot of near-term buyers," Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said.

Intel's quad-core processors combine two dual-core chips into a single package. Rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices has a quad-core processor code-named Barcelona under development that puts all four cores on a single slice of silicon. However, that chip won't arrive until midway through this year.

Servers, which often juggle multiple independent tasks, are well-suited to taking advantage of multiple processing cores. With desktop machines, however, the benefits aren't as clear because software often isn't able to use all the cores effectively.

(c) news.com.com

Toshiba Designing New Reactor

Japan's Toshiba Corp. (6502.TO) said Friday it was independently designing a new boiling-water reactor, or BWR, for use in nuclear power plants.
"We are making a preliminary conceptual design for a next-generation" BWR, a company spokesman said.
Toshiba, a Tokyo-based company whose businesses run from consumer electronics to large industrial infrastructure, has developed its nuclear reactor business together with General Electric Co. (GE) for over 40 years.
But in November, GE agreed to integrate its nuclear operations with Hitachi Ltd. (6501.TO), fueling speculation that GE and Toshiba could eventually become rivals. A report Friday in The Nikkei said Toshiba would market a BWR on its own by 2015.
The Toshiba spokesman said the new reactor was being chiefly designed for the domestic market, as the Japanese government was planning to upgrade its current generation of reactors from around 2030.
"It is too premature to discuss competition" with GE, he said, adding that the two companies are still jointly developing boiling water reactors.

(c) neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com

Here comes the terabyte hard drive

Last year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies predicted hard-drive companies would announce 1 terabyte drives by the end of 2006. Hitachi was only off by a few days.

The company said on Thursday that it will come out with a 3.5-inch-diameter 1 terabyte drive for desktops in the first quarter, then follow up in the second quarter with 3.5-inch terabyte drives for digital video recorders, bundled with software called Audio-Visual Storage Manager for easier retrieval of data, and corporate storage systems.

The Deskstar 7K1000 will cost $399 when it comes out. That comes to about 40 cents a gigabyte. Hitachi will also come out with a similar 750GB drive. Rival Seagate Technology will come out with a 1 terabyte drive in the first half of 2007.

The two companies, along with others, will tout their new drives at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and will show off hybrid hard drives, as well.

A terabyte is a trillion bytes, or a million megabytes, or 1,000 gigabytes, as measured by the hard-drive industry. (There are actually two conventions for calculating megabytes, but this is how the drive industry counts it.) As a reference, the print collection in the Library of Congress comes to about 10 terabytes of information, according to the How Much Information study from U.C. Berkeley. The report also found that 400,000 terabytes of e-mail get produced per year. About 50,000 trees would be necessary to create enough paper to hold a terabyte of information, according to the report.

Who needs this sort of storage capacity? You will, eventually, said Doug Pickford, director of market and product strategy at Hitachi. Demand for data storage capacity at corporations continues to grow, and it shows no sign of abating. A single terabyte drive takes up less space than four 250GB drives, which lets IT managers conserve on computing room real estate. The drive can hold about 330,000 3MB photos or 250,000 MP3s, according to Hitachi's math.

Consumers, meanwhile, are gobbling up more drive capacity because of content like video. An hour of standard video takes up about 1GB, while an hour of high-definition video sucks up 4GB, Pickford said.

Consumers, though, tend to be skeptical of ever needing more storage capacity.

"We heard that when we brought out 1 gigabyte drives," Pickford said.

The boost in capacity for desktop drives comes in part through the introduction of perpendicular recording technology to 3.5-inch-diameter drives. In perpendicular drives, data can be stored in vertical columns, rather than on a single plane. Drive makers have already released notebook drives, which sport smaller 2.5-inch-diameter drives, with perpendicular recording. The 1 terabyte drives will be Hitachi's first 3.5-inch drives with perpendicular recording.

Currently, Hitachi sells 3.5-inch drives that hold 500GB of data, while Seagate has come out with a 750GB data drive.

Drive makers convert to perpendicular recording when the need for areal density, the measure of how much data can be crammed into a square inch, passes 125 gigabits. The terabyte drive (and the 750GB drive) can hold 148 gigabits per square inch, or 148 billion bits. Hitachi's previous 3.5-inch drives maxed out at 115 gigabits per square inch.

The hard drive turned 50 last year, and over the past five decades data capacity has increased at a fairly regular and rapid pace. The first drive, which came with the RAMAC computer, weighed about a ton and held 5MB of data.

Hard-drive scientists say that increases in capacity will continue because of technologies like heat-assisted recording and patterned media.

(c) www.netscape.com

Samsung announces double-sided LCDs

by Ken Fisher

If two heads are better than one, are two faces on a single LCD a no-brainer? Samsung today announced that it has created thin-film transistor, liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) panels capable of showing independent images on both sides of an LCD screen. Unlike other two-faced LCDs which only show an image and its reverse on the flipside, the Samsung solution can display two different images. According to Samsung, the dual-sided LCDs have been designed primarily for use in mobile products. One obvious application would be cell phones that currently have two separate displays.

Is this a battery-life nightmare in the making? Samsung says no. Although there are two visual surfaces, the new dual-sided LCD uses one backlight. One side of the LCD also helps out with illumination, using the light trapped by one side's "transmissive mode" projection to illuminate the reflective side. Transmissive LCDs are those which are actively illuminated from behind LCDs cells, and make up most LCDs that we look at these days. Reflective LCDs are just the opposite: they rely on ambient light for illumination, and therefore are less clear and offer less contrast than transmissive LCDs. You've seen these on digital watches or on the exteriors of many flip phones (some have backlights that can be activated).

How do you display two images on a single LCD? Normal LCDs have TFT gates that each operate a single pixel, but Samsung's dual-sided LCDs put two control gates on each pixel, allowing it to control each side independently without having to double the circuitry. Complex calculations take care of the rest.

Samsung's dual-sided LCD panels

Samsung will begin mass production of a 2.6mm thick and 2.22" wide QVGA (240 x 320 pixel) dual-sided panel in the first half of this year. The company said it will show off the display at CES, so we'll be sure to check it out and ask them if they expect this technology to ever make its way outside of mobile devices.

(c) www.arstechnica.com

Samsung to unveil large LCD TVs

by Eric A. Taub

Samsung, the world's largest seller of televisions, will introduce at next week's Consumer Electronics Show a new line of rear-projection liquid crystal display televisions that will not be much thicker than flat-panel TVs but will cost about 30 percent less.

The new sets, aimed at those who want a bigger set but cannot afford a plasma TV, will come in 50- to 60-inch sizes. At 10 inches deep, they can be hung on a wall.

While consumers are embracing LCD flat-panel TVs in ever-larger sizes, Samsung has also recommitted itself to plasma TV and will double its current plasma production capacity later this year, said G.S. Choi, the company's president for digital media, in an interview from South Korea.

Plasma will continue to dominate in larger sizes, and the company will add an 80-inch model to its lineup this year, Choi said. To help consumers fit these larger sizes in their homes, Samsung said it was redesigning the TV frames to make them up to 30 percent thinner.

At the electronics show, held annually in Las Vegas, Samsung will also introduce a wireless plasma TV that will be able to receive HDTV programming sent from an HD DVD or Blu-ray player or set-top box. Because there will be no cables to hide, consumers may be more likely to hang such a plasma display on a wall.

The company, which was the first to introduce a Blu-ray high-definition DVD player last year, will announce its second-generation player next week. The new model is expected to cost about 20 percent less than the current version, but will have more interactive functions.

Although LG will introduce a dual format HD DVD/Blu-ray player, Samsung has no plans to do the same. "If the market is still divided, we could do a dual-format player, but we will wait and see," Choi said.

Entire contents, Copyright © 2007 The New York Times. All rights reserved.

LG to Launch Dual-format Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD Player

It was bound to happen: In the mess known as the high-def format wars, eventually, it was clear a manufacturer would cross party lines and release a single player capable of handling both Blu-ray Discs and HD DVD discs. The question wasn't if; it was a question of when.

LG Electronics is the first to cross that line: The company has just announced it will be launching the first dual-format high-definition disc player at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week. The LG press release issued in Korea early Thursday morning is short on details--the player will launch in "early 2007", but beyond that, we have no information on pricing--but that's of little consequence for now. I imagine the details will become clear by Sunday, when LG holds its press conference at CES.

LG stated it was considering a dual-format player at the CeBIT show last March, but the company has been quiet about its progress until now. The company is the first to formally announce a dual-format player; prior to this, Ricoh and NEC had both announced they had developed components that could read both Blu-ray and HD DVD media, but neither had announced actual products. Samsung had also made rumblings about coming out with a dual-format player, but the company backtracked on those reports early last year.

The LG announcement dramatically alters the competitive landscape for Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. The mere announcement of a dual-format player could stall the market for high-definition players and discs, as consumers anticipate the dual-format player's arrival. A dual-format player would offer consumers a hedge against obsolence, in the event one of the disc formats dies out over time.

And once the dual-format player does come out, it could ignite the market for high-definition players and discs, a market that's still in its infancy.

Price will likely play a big role, though, in the dual-format player's success. If the player is expensive--and, certainly, I expect it to carry a premium over a standalone player, at least at launch--its high price may deter consumers from buying right now. However, if the dual-format player's premium is an acceptable one to consumers, then the player could take off--in turn driving consumers to buy movies in high-definition, without having to worry about which studios are backing which disc format.

However, while a dual-format player will help consumers worried about buying into the wrong format, it won't help content producers. Dual-format players will remain a rarity, for at least the next year. If dual-format players do become the norm, studios will be faced with a quandary: Continue to support both formats, a costly endeavor, or release new and catalog content in just one of the disc formats--thereby foregoing support of those early adopters who bought into whichever disc format falls by the wayside.

Are you itching to buy a high-def disc player? Does news of a dual-format player make you more likely to buy a high-def disc player in the next year?

(c) blogs.pcworld.com